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The sensor-topped vehicles first appeared in the nation’s capital two years ago to cart around lawmakers — House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) took a spin — and pacify influential skeptics. Their reappearance, as federal and state governments consider how to regulate automated vehicles, demonstrates a prime Google strategy: the slow and orchestrated rollout of controversial inventions.

“We still have lots of problems to solve,” Chris Urmson, Google’s director of the self-driving car project, said in a blog post this week. “But thousands of situations on city streets that would have stumped us two years ago can now be navigated autonomously.”

Most of the experiments this past year took place on the company’s Northern California turf, although D.C., Michigan, Nevada and Florida officially allow the testing of self-driving cars. No state statute specifically bans it — yet.

Google researchers have made significant headway in the five years since they launched their “moonshot” idea, which originated in the same secretive lab as Google Glass. The vehicles have logged almost 700,000 miles without accidents, the company said, a distance that has given engineers confidence to try urban roads filled with distracted pedestrians and speedy cyclists.

The Lexus RX 450H — with a prominent Google logo on its side and a metal contraption strapped to its roof — can now notice sudden stop signs, swerve around most construction cones and detect a cyclist motioning to turn. Researchers still struggle with nuances such as lane changes and nasty weather. Urmson said they plan to teach the car to drive more streets in Google’s hometown of Mountain View before “we tackle another town.”

The company did not say how many cars descended on D.C. this week or where they might appear.

Connected and autonomous vehicles mopped up attention at the popular CES International show in Las Vegas this year, and automakers such as Ford and Tesla are working on their own versions. Global information company IHS has predicted that self-driving cars, with humans involved, will hit highways worldwide by 2025 and replace the driver entirely by 2030. The group estimates the technology will initially add up to $10,000 on the sticker price.

The advent of driverless cars — spurred largely by Google’s advances — has come to represent the distance between innovation and regulation. Supporters bill these futuristic devices as the solution to safer, more pleasant commuting for a car-centric culture. Regulators worry about liabilities like who takes the blame when a driverless car hits a school bus or what happens to all the data collected on a person’s daily sojourns.

“We only have one chance to get this right,” former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration head David Strickland warned at the CES show this year.

The D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles has only just proposed regulations for the district’s autonomous vehicle law, which went into effect last year. A spokeswoman for the department said the Google cars followed the law, which requires a person to sit in the driver’s seat and make sure he or she can take control if needed.

“We’re not the Jetsons yet,” said John Townsend, the manager of public and government affairs at AAA Mid-Atlantic’s Washington office.

He called Google’s decision to try out D.C. “bold and risky” due to the city’s notorious gridlock and prevalent lawmaker eyes. That also makes it a perfect location.

“They took it right into the lions’ dens today,” said Townsend, who noticed the car on his way to work Tuesday morning. “They took it on the Hill. If you ever want to avoid a crash or fender bender, this is the place to avoid going.”